Secretary for State for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Caroline Spelman has just announced that this year spending to protect coastal areas against erosion and flooding will be £664 million. This represents a cut of approximately 17%, which is somewhat less than the average 25% cuts most departments are facing.
Nontheless, Caroline Spelman has a thankless task in having to administer spending cuts. However, as I have argued before, now would be a very good time to deregulate some aspects of sea defence, in particular creating a presumption in favour of local landowners and communities being allowed to defend their local coastline themselves.
Sea defence has always been seriously underfunded with the previous budget, which represented less than 0.1% of public spending, quite literally only being adequate to fund a few miles of new sea wall. In the medium term there is an extremely important need for much greater spending on sea defence due to a combination of a) many of the sea defences built by the Eden and Macmillan governments following the 1953 floods either reaching the end of their useful life or being in need of urgent repair; and b) sea level rise which has been averaging around 1.5mm a year since we began recording it around 150 years ago. It should also be noted that in the South and East Anglia rises in relative sea level are actually much higher around 3-4mm or more a year due to the additional effects of isostatic readjustment (in non technical terms – during the last ice the North of England was pressed down by the weight of massive ice sheets, but now as land in the North of England slowly springs back, the South of England is experiencing a corresponding downwards tilt resulting in a much greater relative sea level rise there).
The implications of these sea level rises are firstly, coastal erosion will increase as more areas become exposed to wave attack; and secondly, some major flood defences will need significant upgrading, particularly as tidal surges are likely to increase in frequency and intensity. It should be remembered that the 1953 North Sea tidal surge killed 307 people and inundated large parts of Lincolnshire, Cambridgeshire, Norfolk and Suffolk up to 30 miles inland, causing massive damage to property, infrastructure and the economy. The flood defences that will need upgrading include both sea walls in coastal towns and very substantial flood defence structures such as those that protect the fens from flooding.
Whilst painful cuts in the short term are clearly necessary if the economy is not to be crippled with debt, it is really important that we plan now for the medium and long term. We cannot simply put off the issue of sea defence in the way that the previous Labour government did, any more than we can put off building new power stations if we are to keep the lights on. There are likely to be major economic consequences to not significantly increasing spending on sea defence, as was illustrated by a recent Lloyds report calling for a substantial increase in UK spending on flood defence by 2035 to avoid 'disaster'.
I am therefore suggesting that we set an aspirational target of the percentage of public spending on sea defence that is needed in the medium term. To set that figure we need to undertake a sea defence review, similar to the military defence review, which would set out what we actually need to do in terms of reasonable protection against coastal flooding and erosion and how much it will cost.
Unfortunately, the previous Labour government did not do this. They appear to have set the budget, then looked at what needed doing. There was no overall strategy, just an ad hoc approach to repairing some sea defences and abandoning others on grounds of cost. What is now needed is a sea defence review conducted every 5-10 years or so (the Netherlands review every five years), that sets out what we reasonably need to do to protect coastal communities and inland areas threatened by coastal flooding. Some of that data is already there. For example two years ago the Environment Agency concluded that £150 million was needed to defend a few miles of the North Suffolk/East Norfolk coast against flooding. However, it didn’t happen because there was no overall strategy, simply an ad hoc approach to spending a budget.
My best guess is that the aspirational target we need to set is going to be at least 0.5% of public spending – and may well be more. This is similar to the 0.7% target that we are committed to spending on overseas aid in the medium term. However, if we do not plan now to spend significantly more on sea defence in the near future, by which I mean by the end of this parliament, then we will be heaping up major problems for the longer term and leaving ourselves politically vulnerable in the event of a major coastal flooding event such as the 1953 North Sea tidal surge, which we came extraordinarily close to having a repeat of in November 2007.
